Who are the top SSD companies? - the
companies which you absolutely have to look at if you've got any new
projects involving SSDs? - Here they are in the list below.

For the
series overview, links to earlier (and later) editions of this list and an
outline of our market proven methodology (which is based on analyzing the
search volume of millions of SSD readers on
StorageSearch.com who have made the
SSD market what it is today)
click here.

.

...

"... in many cases -
the best value is still in SSD companies which you can't invest in - unless you
buy the whole company..."

In this quarter
STEC announced that its revenue for the quarter ended September 30 was 57%
lower than the same quarter 3 years before. In the same 3 year period the
available SSD market had grown about 8x bigger.

As part of its company recovery strategy following the loss of its CEO
and SEC filing problems reported in the previous quarter OCZ slimmed down its
catalog and headcount and made strenuous efforts to convince observers that
it was focusing on the more promising business segments in its product and
customer mix.

Although few people on this
planet really understand the complex mix of technologies which Skyera has
mastered to architect one of the world's most
efficiently
engineered SSD arrays - almost anyone can easily appreciate the results when
they're presented with the resulting price and performance.

One of the
frustrations for Skyera, however, is that demonstrating reliability and apps
compatibility as a newcomer to the mission critical systems market - can't be
rushed.

Although
nothing dramatically new was announced by TMS in its first full quarter as
an IBM company - there were already signs that the "SSD secret sauce"
absorption was already underway when the TMS product line appeared in a
strategic IBM presentation at the Server Design Summit.

(And for
people who communicate with TMS another sure sign of steady progress is that
they all have new shiny IBM domain email addresses.)

Negative
publicity and uncertainty related to re-organizations in 2 of SMART's SAS
SSD competitors (STEC and OCZ) combined with growing market appreciation of
the significance of adaptive R/W technology helped to create a more
favorable search climate for SMART in this quarter.

And SMART's MLC
based SAS SSDs performed mostly well when compared to (older) and more
expensive SLC SAS SSDs from SanDisk, HGST and Toshiba in a review by
StorageReview.com

Recently BiTMICRO
has confirmed that it had changed its business strategy from being (mainly) a
supplier of rugged embedded SSDs for the industrial and military markets - to
becoming a supplier of fast SSD controllers and fast SSDs aimed primarily at the
enterprise SSD market.

Overriding
all previous faltering (and sometimes misdirected) steps taken by Micron in the
SSD market in recent years - the company's 2 biggest legacy achievements in the
SSD market upto now were clearly revealed in 2012.

Does it matter that
Intel, while being a world leading semiconductor company, lacks true grit -
in the SSD sense?

That assessment coming through clearly too in
millions of SSD reader searches is why Intel has been in the lower half of
the top 20 SSD companies lists in the past few years.

Intel has
improved its enterprise SSDs from being naiively designed and potentially
unreliable to adequately me-too.

Why didn't Intel put more resources
into SSD? And why were its flash SSD offerings - for many few years - so
insipid and flaky?

The effect on Intel's thinking of the market distorting lens factor
of - "SSDs are similar to..." are analyzed in the (February 2013)
article - Can
you trust SSD market data?

But another new reason for SSD users to
reconsider Intel's enterprise SSDs - may be software. The capabilities of the
company's new cache accelerator software and its market impact were explored in
an interview (February 2013). Click on
Intel's profile page or
the SSD auto caching news
page for more details.

From
external appearances it seems almost as if the company has gone back into
stealth mode.

The real issue is probably too few people in the company
being stretched by the demands of a small number of strategic business
inquiries which doesn't leave bandwidth for reaching out to the wider market.

These
"quiet" signs are also typical in the lead up to
acquisition
announcements.

There
are about 400 SSD companies I know of with visibility below the level of the
companies named above.

Does it matter?

For some it doesn't.

The SSD market is so large now that some of
the niches within it are bigger than the whole market was 5 years ago. For
companies who simply aspire to be good profitable businesses with revenues in
the tens of millions of dollars range (or multiples of that) - they can probably
get hold of a leading position in their niche and not worry too much about
what's happening to other companies in the wider SSD market. And as SSDs get
more focused and application specific - that's a viable strategy. They still
need our readers - because our readers make the market. But they don't need to
engage with so many of them.

For other companies it does matter.

Every
week I talk to people in SSD companies who say their company aspires to be a
world leader and one of the top SSD companies.

Can they tell me why
anyone should be interested in their products? or doing business with them?

Can
they tell me what they do that's different and better compared to hundreds of
other SSD companies?

Can they tell me what efforts they've made to
invest in communicating their business propositions to the outside world? -
apart from talking to their employees and some legacy distributors, chatting to
some guys they spoke to at a trade show - and writing a meaningless press
release?

Often the answer is to these questions is no. But it
doesn't stop these wannbe the next big SSD companies being greatly surprised
to hear from me that there's more to becoming a leading SSD company than
putting the bits together.

Doesn't the fact they are already so well
known for their other past products (which aren't SSDs - but which do use
chips) will guarantee they have a good starting point?

Maybe - I say -
if they went back in time 5 or 10 years and launched the same product back then
- they wouldn't need these other skills and they could still be successful.

Despite
my doubts - it's possible that even without having any marketing skills
whatsoever - they will be lucky enough to find a lot of customers who know even
less than they do about SSDs - to whom they can sell something.

For
more on this theme take a look at earlier editions in
this series.

The
sample size in Q4 2012 included over 200,000 unique SSD readers on
StorageSearch.com and the rankings were moderated by sanity check referral
data from thousands of external web sites which linked here in that period.